Setting a brokerage account to type "Savings"

RockLee

I would prefer to track my brokerage account in Simplifi as a savings account. However, when I set the account type to "Savings" Simplifi no longer updates new transactions, anyone else?

Coach Jon

Hello @RockLee,

Thanks for reaching out! To help clarify your situation, can you let us know what types of transactions are usually downloaded into the account? If they are investment actions, like buys/sells, generally they will not be able to be downloaded into a regular savings account.

Let us know!

-Coach Jon

RockLee

@Coach Jon

Yea, the transactions are investment buys/sells, interest, dividends, etc… Strangely, for most of these transactions the "Action" and "Security/Payee" are blank and only "Description/Category" is specified on the Investment transaction, so Action is just blank.

Simplifi is the only financial aggregator I know of that separates investment transactions from other transactions. I appreciate the approach given that investment actions are different, but in practice I think it's confusing. Also, it doesn't help that Simplifi investment pages are still Beta. Important functionality such as downloading transactions, applying rules, flagging, recurring, etc.. are missing from Investment transactions. I was hoping I could gain full regular transaction functionality by switching the account type to "Savings". I didn't think I could, but I thought I would throw it out there. I would prefer to track "Actions" as categories of dividend/margin/buy/sell/interest etc..

Coach Jon

Hello @RockLee,

Thanks for the information. To help clarify some things you mentioned, what did you mean by "Important functionality such as downloading transactions, applying rules, flagging, recurring, etc.. are missing from Investment transactions." Are you unable to download investment transactions? There are of course some things you cannot do yet, but you should be able to have those transactions downloaded.

Additionally, you mentioned that you have blank fields for the Action and Security/Payee columns. Can you provide a screenshot showing this?

Thanks,

Coach Jon

RockLee

Hello @Coach Jon

Downloading a CSV file with investment transactions is not available. The button is there, but it is greyed out, so I assume this is functionality intended to be implemented at some point. There's a feature request for this.

I'll add a screen shot of the blank fields when I get new transactions. However, I convert all my transactions to "payment/deposit", for various reasons they are easier to manage this way, hence the desire to mange my Investment account as a Savings account.

Coach Jon

Hello @RockLee,

Thanks for the reply. I am glad you were able to find the idea post for exporting investment transactions. I will post it here as well so other users coming to this thread are aware of it.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/5964/ability-to-import-export-investment-transactions-edited

But you are correct in that the feature is not yet implemented in Quicken Simplifi. Let us know once you can provide those screenshots showing the blank fields.

Thanks,

Coach Jon

RockLee

First transaction to come in since this discussion. The top transaction is a dividend payment. Action and Security/Payee are blank which I think is true for all transactions.

Coach Natalie

@RockLee, thanks for the reply!

After reading through this thread, I'm unsure of how you have this account classified in Quicken Simplifi. If you go to Settings > Accounts and select to edit the account, you should see a "Type" field — what is shown here? If it's an Investment Type, have you tried changing it to a Savings Type to see if you get better results for downloaded transactions? Or do you want to keep the transactions in the Investments > Transactions section so they can have Investing Actions?

Please let us know so we can best assist!

-Coach Natalie

RockLee

Hello @Coach Natalie

As displayed in this discussion, the "Type" field is set to "Brokerage". Yes, I have tried to set the account "type" to Savings but when I do this the account transactions stops updating. I would prefer setting the account type to Savings to avoid many of the shortcomings of the Brokerage account type and the investment page.

I really didn't start this discussion to get a resolution on the investment page, I was just throwing a general question out there if anyone has had luck setting a brokerage account to type "Savings".

Coach Natalie

@RockLee, ahh I see now — and that makes sense if the transactions you're downloading are investing actions rather than cash flow transactions. Have you considered tracking the account manually as a Savings Type?

-Coach Natalie

RockLee

Yea…. manual is possible, but some months see more activity than others in my investing account, easier just to modify them as they download. I change the action on all investment transactions to "payment/deposit" so it is straight forward to change the account type to Savings, if I need to download. Unfortunately it is not trivial to switch back and forth between brokerage and savings because visibility (spending plan, reporting) is not preserved :(.

SRC54

I've appreciated this thread. I was thinking of opening one of these accounts at Fidelity to use like a checking or savings account. I will stick with my brokerage account for now.

I think what we probably need is a dedicated way in Simplifi to handle these money management accounts so that their special features are exploited. I know Quicken Classic allowed you (not sure now) to put your cash part of your brokerage account in the Checking Account area.

RockLee

@SRC54 yea, I think in theory that's Simplifi's intention, to separate out investment transactions from regular credit/checking/savings. It makes since in "Theory" because you have properties like price/share, quantity etc.. The problem though in Simplifi is that the investment section is underdeveloped, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, they have their hands full with the rest of the app. Additionally, they changed the aggregator for my brokerage (Interactive Brokers) from Intuit to Plaid, and it's very buggy… Fields left blank, flipped signs. I see that other platforms don't handle investment accounts in any special way, at least from a UI point of view, brokerage/checking/credit are all listed together along with transactions. In practice I think this works fine, it's pretty natural to have an 'Investment' main category, and subcategories such as dividend, fee, stock buy, stock sell, etc…. This is also how Mint worked. RIP

Anyway, I was hoping to find some life hack so that I could accomplish the above, and sidestep investments, no such luck. Fidelity may work better since it's much more popular than Interactive Brokers, gets more attention, but from other discussions it looks… awkward…

SRC54

I wish I knew what to suggest to you. I find that Schwab works better than Fidelity in Simplifi, but both are fine. But I don't have a complicated investment setup.

The Schwab Account is my wife's Roth IRA. It just has two investments: a Schwab stock fund and a Government Money Fund. I have the account ignored for Reports and Spending Plan. It updates automatically the Cost Basis and it handles the reinvestments with a Dividend transaction and a Buy transaction. I used to have some cash in it that got an interest payment each month and would do it as an income/payment transaction that I would change to an Income Interest transaction, but I rolled it into the Gov't Fund.

The Fidelity Accounts are two: a brokerage and my IRA. The latter account is ignored in Reports and Spending Plan. Fidelity does NOT update the cost basis.

In the IRA, since I reinvest the dividends, the cost basis remains the same, I just have more shares, BUT Simplifi thinks I should update the basis and it won't accept the current basis so I add one penny (next month I'll subtract the penny). It also downloads the dividend transactions funny. It downloads 2 transactions for each dividend, one as a dividend and one as a reinvestment (that really should be a buy). Since I don't have many, I fix the reinvestment so it goes to a 0.00 transaction and delete the other (I may actually change the dividend to a reinvestment and delete the phony reinvestment transactions. I don't remember.

In the Brokerage account, I have 2 payments each month that are dividends that I spend, so I have transaction rules that mark these payments as Dividends that are in the Spending Plan and are taxable. The cash is reinvested into the core account, another gov't money fund. Again this interest/dividend is a payment and in the Spending Plan. (Fidelity takes all of this and buys into the Core Account immediately. When I transfer it to checking, it sells it again. So I only have to update the Cost Basis in the Gov't Money Fund, which is easy since it is always the total cash amount.